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BLACK SABBATH Announces Four North American Shows

BLACK SABBATH has announced four summer shows in North America in support of the band’s new album, “13”. Tickets for the Live Nation-produced tour will go on sale Saturday, April 20 at LiveNation.com. The dates include stops in Holmdel, New Jersey; Los Angeles; Seattle; and Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Tickets for these shows go on sale Saturday, April 20. Beginning today, fans can click here for early access to presale tickets available Thursday, April 18. VIP Packages are also available at VIPNation.com.

The members of BLACK SABBATH were interviewed last Wednesday (April 10) by new Fuse correspondent Jack Osbourne, who, of course, had an inside advantage in landing the interview thanks to being singer Ozzy Osbourne‘s son. Ozzy, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler made a surprise appearance that evening at a Los Angeles listening party for “13”, where Jack asked if there was any nervousness about making a record together after 35 years.

His father replied, “The pressure was on us, because it had been so long since we’d worked together . . . it’s like now or never. This album, for me, was probably the most important of my career.”

Iommi discussed the writing process for the disc, saying, “I had a bunch of riffs on CDs and played it to everybody, and then everybody decided, ‘We like this one’ or ‘We don’t like that,’ and the ones we liked, we started work on them.”

The band was also asked about working with producer Rick Rubin, who has a reputation for actually not showing up very often to the sessions he is getting paid to “produce.” Iommi said, “It was funny at first, because coming to rehearsals, when we were actually writing the songs, he’d come down for like, five or ten minutes and then go. Then he’d go, ‘Call me when you’ve got another one.’ So it was really strange. We’d never worked with anybody like that before.”

“13” comes out on June 11 and is the first SABBATH album to feature Ozzy, Iommi and Butler together since 1978’s “Never Say Die!”Brad Wilk of RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE provided drum tracks in lieu of original drummer Bill Ward.

SABBATH will begin a world tour later this month in Australia, with European gigs penciled in for the fall.

The band will also make a rare TV appearance to perform a new song called “End Of The Beginning” on the season finale of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”. The episode is set to air on Wednesday, May 15 at 10:00 p.m. ET on CBS.